Thomas Davis (Young Irelander)

Thomas Davis (14 October 1814-16 September 1845) was the chief organizer of the nationalist Young Ireland movement during the 1840s.

Biography
Thomas Osborne Davis was born in Mallow, County Cork, Ireland on 14 October 1814, the son of a Welsh farmer (who died one month after his birth) and an Irish mother. He graduated from Trinity College and became a lawyer in 1838, and he wrote nationalist ballads for the Repeal Association's publication The Nation. The Protestant Davis preached unity between Protestants and Catholics, and he argued that it was not blood that made a person Irish, but the willingness to be part of the Irish nation. Davis soon became the leader of a younger and more radical faction within the Repeal Association which opposed the moderate Daniel O'Connell, and this movement later split off to form the Young Ireland movement. Davis died of scarlet fever in 1845 at the age of 30.